King Maker: The Knights of Breton Court, Volume 1

by Maurice Broaddus

  Folks were their own worst enemy, getting caught up in their own foolishness. "You can't lose if you don't play," King's mother used to say. King scampered toward the melee. Fights happened. The way King saw them, they were healthy. So much stuff kept going down, poor folks struggling to get by, frustrated, pissed off, they occasionally needed to vent some of that hostility off or else they'd just selfdestruct. The girls wrestled about, caught up in their anger and self-hatred. A slap for the parents who weren't there for her. A punch for the system of poverty that enslaved them. A kick for the teachers who didn't give two fucks for her. An elbow to the gut for her even being in this place. A rake across the face for the police baton across her back. Fights were neighborhood sport as long as you weren't caught up in them and as long as folks remembered to use their fists. Folks were too quick to settle things with guns, escalating things to levels past what they needed.

  But King didn't like the… energy… of this brouhaha. There was something in the air, an undercurrent of violence and hate. It looked like a couple ladies beefing, probably over some man, fueled by the need to show out for their girls. But something else was at play. The ground too warm. As if the earth itself spread into the crowd, a cloud of methane waiting for something to spark it. One looked like she had some Mexican blood in her. The other… King's heart tugged at him. The girl, medium-skinned and serious-faced, drew him in, filling his spaces, voids he wasn't aware he had. Not wanting any harm to come to her, he found himself moving toward her. His grim strides turned into a jog.

  A strong set of hands grabbed Lady G by the shoulders and lifted her up, freeing her from the entanglement of Alaina. With regained leverage, Alaina unleashed a flurry of punches and kicks. Lady G, prepared to defend against them, clawed and kicked in her direction. The man who held her spun her away from Alaina's assault and took the blows himself as he backed away. Bodies jostled against them, but they seemed to bounce off the man. He put himself between her and them, unasked. Then the shots rang out. He wrapped his thick arms around her, his hard muscles cocooning her as he scooped her along.

  "You OK?" he asked, his voice breathy, not from the exertion but from speaking in low, controlled tones as if crazy shit wasn't jumping off all around him.

  "Put me down and mind your own. I got this," Lady G said.

  "I know you do. I'm worried about them if I let you loose."

  The crowd moved like a tangled swarm of cicadas, limbs intertwined and flailing about trying to gain leverage or hold their ground. Girls pulled at each other's tops and hair extensions. Despite the screams and shouts reaching a cacophonous pitch, they couldn't drown out the report of shots ringing out.

  The fight degenerated into a storm of scratching and clawing and folks wilding out on folks just for the sake of doing so. Part of her thrilled at this. It was exciting, sexy, and dangerous. And made her feel alive. If only for a few moments, she felt.

  Jockeying for position. A hardness in her eyes, she'd quit caring. She held onto the emptiness she always carried inside her. The crowd darted toward her, spilling into the playground, kicking up wood chips in their wake. The mood of the crowd turned uglier. The instant chaos.

  No one needed to yell "gun!" The reports scattered the crowd and the people charged from every direction.

  Rhianna found herself separated from her girl. The melee was like a riptide, pulling folks caught in the undertow of bodies away from the action. If Rhianna stopped moving, she might have been trampled.

  His head lowered, hands raised above it as if he were shielding himself, Percy waded through the bodies. Without trying, he pushed people aside. Heedless of his own well-being, all he knew was that her bloodless face was etched in pain. Despite no foundation, no lip gloss, no nail polish, no blush, no eyeliner, she was as beautiful to him as ever. He was embarrassed to stare at her for too long.

  He stood there, not touching her. Not crowding her in any way. But he remained between her and the danger. He took any blows purposeful or accidental without so much as a wince.

  Two bodies were left in the wake of the gun shots. Alaina, one eye a pocket of darkness with much of the back of her head missing; her mother shot in the belly. The news would go on to speak of the violence, the irony of Alaina's mother giving birth to one child as she lost another.

  The cops put a knee into Percy's back, dropping him to the ground. Rhianna screamed at them to let him go. Blows rained down on him. Bloodied, but without complaint, he laid on the ground.

  "What's the problem here?" Detective Burke said.

  "Just securing the scene."

  "He's a suspect."

  "He was threatening the girl."

  "No he wasn't. He was looking out for me."

  "That true, son?" Detective Burke asked.

  "I'd never hurt Rhianna."

  "Let him go." Detective Burke's eyes softened. "But we do need to get control of the situation and secure this scene."

  "Yes ma'am."

  "And get an ambo up here." Angry and controlled.

  Another in a trail of bodies leading back to the Phoenix Apartments, it was like a poisoning of the souls emanating from there. A tension settled on the west side of town, an ugly, frenzied spirit of darkness threatening to smother them.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The police questioned everyone for hours. What facts they could piece together from the jumbled statements was anyone's guess. Folks recounted little past fists flying and barely remembered glimpses of faces here and there.

  Lady G hadn't left King's side since the attack. Though he towered over her, a tremor of fear ran through him. Instinct fought against the connection he sensed with her. His gut told him to move along – run if need be – that she was trouble waiting to hurt him. Many times he'd encountered women like Lady G. Women who took one look at a darker brother and cast him aside like a lesion best scraped off. But maybe that was him being unnecessarily defensive. There was a familiarity to her, a piece of a puzzle he never knew was missing. Too much of that had been going on in his life lately, like a game was going on and everyone had a copy of the rulebook except him.

  "Can we get out of here?" Lady G slipped her gloved hand into his, soft, gentle, and unassuming. Struck by the mystery of the affection, King didn't know what to do with it. It wasn't wholly unpleasant.

  "Yeah, I only live a few blocks down."

  Lady G hesitated. She read his tone see if there was the hint of proposition, or worse, the expectation of one. The invitation wasn't what made her uncomfortable. It seemed genuine and despite there being little about his day to justify her feeling safe, she nevertheless did. No, what made her uncomfortable was being seen. Most times, no one saw her. People may have had a sense about homeless folks, the same way one could be in a darkened room and know that they weren't alone. People knew when to walk around them or speed out of the way of a possible solicitation of a handout.

  Like hunting deer, one didn't look for the deer themselves, but rather trained their eyes to detect movement or some evidence of presence. With homeless teens, one checked what didn't belong. Like wearing long sleeve shirts on an eighty degree evening. Why? Because it got cool under bridges even at night. Or duct-taped shoes. Or conspicuous backpacks, containing all of their earthly belongings. Nothing definitive, only clues to a greater story, once you know what to look for. If you bother looking at all.

  But King saw her.

  Lady G hiked her backpack onto her shoulder.

  "We ready to go?" Rhianna strode over to them, cutting a dagger-filled glance at Lady G's hand in King's. Percy, bruised and bandaged, followed behind her.

  "Nah, I think I'm all right," Lady G said.

  Rhianna continued to study King, wondering – though not having to guess too hard – what this oldass dude (he was what? Probably twenty-eight or something) wanted with her girl. "Where the spot be at?"

  "Round the way."

  "So is it just y'all or is there room for a few more?"

  "It's tight as it is." />
  "It's like that?"

  "Yeah. I'll catch up with you," Lady G reassured her. "You be at the bank squat?"

  "Uh-uhn. I don't want every motherfucker knowin'."

  "I know a spot," Percy said.

  "All right then." Rhianna relaxed.

  "You sure?"

  "You giving me a choice?" Rhianna asked. Lady G shook her head. "All right then."

  Dismissed, Rhianna and Percy walked toward the bus stop. She turned around one last time to make sure her friend was OK only to spy Lady G leaning into King's casual embrace.

  Big Momma sat on a plastic bench with her neighbor from across the way. Freshly coiffed gray hair, Big Momma's sculpted dignity was undercut by her ashy elbows. The slight heft to her gut actually matched her neighbor's. They didn't say anything, merely sat there. The night wind bit at them, unexpectedly cool for an August night. Lady G assumed a posture designed to keep her warm: arms pulled within her T-shirt. A security porch light lit the court of townhouses. They sat in white plastic lawn chairs. Bent over, King slowly rocked back and forth on the cooler that was his makeshift chair – letting Lady G have the last seat.

  "Who was that one girl who came up here halfnaked?" King asked.

  "Who? Alaina?" Lady G felt a pang of regret at belittling her dead nemesis.

  "Nah. Some spot girl, strolling on up talking about how she just got through letting another woman eat her coochie."

  "Around the kids?" the neighbor asked before taking another drag from her cigarette. That usually signaled a brewing shit storm if she built up a big enough head of steam. She had been married for six years to her high school sweetheart. After the birth of their daughter, their marriage had hit a rocky patch. He had simply had enough at playing grownup. The lure of whiling away his days running the streets proved easier than holding down a straight (read: boring) nine to five gig, but she had bills to pay. So she put his ass out. And took up smoking.

  "Ain't no kids around here anymore," King said. "Folks have to grow up too quick."

  "She had to have been high," Lady G said almost to herself, her mind still mulling over Alaina suddenly bugging out the way she did. "Tweaked out on something. She could be bad, but she don't wild out like that."

  "She like that?" King asked.

  "Just saying. I hear they've got new stuff coming in, got some folks acting up."

  After his father, Luther, died, his moms, Anyay, went off the rails. He lost her in degrees, so no one noticed for a long time. She moved out her momma's house, declaring it time further to spread her wings. More to let the streets seep into her, to find a connection to Luther. Love was a cancer which crept into you unsuspecting, and by the time you realize you have it, it had metastasized into every part of you. And Anyay sought her own brand of chemo, breaking her mother's heart. She died not too long after.

  Two kids later, from men fueling her chemotherapy, it was a short jump to living in their car. They maintained as best they could: school in the morning, cutting out early so that King could do lawn work and odd jobs to get enough money for hotel rooms at night. King thought that his mother would get her act together if she only had the little ones to worry about. A good woman still lived within the fiend she'd become, she just needed a push. The chance to gain her footing in life and she'd pull it together. He knew she would. So he left them.

  She and the kids froze to death that winter, a spike still stuck in her arm.

  "Where she stay at?"

  "Over at the Phoenix."

  "Hmph." Big Momma was a trip. Hers was the only name listed on the lease, her daughter's baby staying with her most of the time so that she could go to a better school. Which was fine with Big Momma. She'd done as much as she could for her own girl. Raised her, put some Jesus in her, prepared her for the world as best she could. But all the good training in the world couldn't trump the ways of the heart and her baby girl kept trying to fill the hole in her spirit with a man. Big Momma was one of those women who had a lot of love to give and hated an empty house. She believed Prez had a good heart but fell in with them boys before she could get a hold of him. She feared she'd lost him for good.

  "I hear the police scooped up Prez," King said as if reading her thoughts. He still rocked on his cooler.

  "His cousin is bonding him out."

  "How much?"

  "Two thousand. I hate dealing with him cause now every time I ask him for something, he's gonna be like 'that's coming out of the money to get your boy out'."

  "'Your boy'. Like they ain't cousins," the neighbor added.

  "OK," Big Momma amen-ed. "Still, I'm lucky that he has that much. The first is around the corner and he could've started crying 'rent's due'. I tell you what though, when Prez gets out, we gonna have a barbecue for the whole neighborhood."

  "I guess that means I'm cooking," King said.

  "That's why I'm telling you." Though she smiled a rueful grin, she wasn't fond of having her business discussed on the street. Of course, neither did King. "How's Nakia doing?"

  King's eyes narrowed, moving from Big Momma to Lady G. Lady G turned toward him, eyebrow arched. His eyes softened as a stratagem of how to play the situation to his advantage sprang to mind. And he wasn't going to give Big Momma the satisfaction of seeing him sweat or scramble. "Let me ask you something. If your baby's momma was with some dude, would you ask to meet him?"

  "Yeah. I'd want to know who my baby was spending time around."

  "That's what I'm saying. I don't want Nakia up around just anybody, but her momma says that I'm too ghetto to meet him."

  "So what'd you say?"

  "I said that 'I'm over you, so it's not like I'm gonna fight him or start anything. I just need to meet him.'"

  "Yeah, but she's still your baby's momma," Lady G said. She found herself wanting to tease out more information from him.

  "So?"

  "So… you always gonna have feelings for her." The statement sounded more like a question to his ear.

  "Not true. I just need to meet him cause if I see my daughter walking down the street with some dude I don't know, then I'm gonna jump on his face for real."

  King couldn't make up his mind who he was mad at the most. His baby's momma for getting pregnant. Himself for dropping out of high school to support her. Big Momma for floating his business. Or God for letting all this mess happen to him.

  King always had a path. Too many folks wanted everything handed to them, but he knew what he wanted, but all paths had the occasional bump. King had no reason being with his baby momma, especially for as long as he was. They knew each other from around the way and hooked up for no more reason than they were there. Then she turned up pregnant. King didn't know what it was, maybe the idea of being a father, but he saw things differently. He wanted to be there to hold Nakia, be a part of her life, show her how a man was supposed to be, so he tried to make it work with her momma. Like an arranged marriage, they had nothing in common except Nakia, he wasn't sure they even liked each other all that much. It was a relationship of convenience: he could be with his daughter and his baby momma had someone to pay the bills. Duty held them together. All this "being in love" bullshit was for poets and chick flicks. Real love went beyond the passion and hype and he had real love.

  For his baby girl.

  Eventually the relationship got old and his baby momma, bills or no bills, came to the point where it wasn't working and threw him out. Despite her getting on his last nerve, he had gotten kind of used to her. He almost missed her sorry ass, though mostly the empty space in his life, and that distant ache he felt was the absence of his daughter.

  "Man I wish next Wednesday would hurry up and get here," the neighbor said, trying to change the topic.

  "Why? You don't get paid till Friday," Big Momma said.

  "Wednesday's the first." Welfare check day.

  "I couldn't handle it if I got paid every other week. I couldn't budget right."

  "Me either. Had to learn." The neighbor flicked her cigarette
butt in the bush just past King's head. "Still wish it would hurry up and get here, though."

  With the conversation devolving into the travails of budgeting, King nodded to Lady G and she followed him inside. Big Momma eyed them. Their court of opposing townhouses lived by its own code. Folks minded their own business as long as they were good neighbors. Even drug dealers: as long as they brought no drama to the court and were polite, a blind eye was conveniently taken. Them throwing the occasional barbecue spurred goodwill also.

  Dragging his cooler inside, he had a chair. Walls painted white, though they required a second coat of paint to cover the graffiti of folks who'd broken in previous. He left the condo unlocked. The back door and window King secured once he moved in. Upon entering, he locked the deadbolt behind them. The water still ran, but the power and gas had been cut off. King unfurled his bedding to form what passed for a couch. In the corner a stack of books propped up a large, quite full, backpack.